From Baftas to building standards – why Don Foster isn’t looking back

Having spent the first two years of the coalition government as a Lib Dem
spokesman on culture, media and sport I knew what a gruelling schedule was,
well before becoming Communities Minister.

Home buildingPhoto: ALAMY

By Don Foster, Housing minister, Department for Communities and Local Government

5:05PM GMT 01 Jan 2013

Fitting in film premières, football and rugby matches, plays, and the BAFTAs was tough but somebody had to do it as the old joke goes. And I loved it. And now as the minister with responsibility for housing what have I swapped this for? Building regulations conferences.

Plenty of friends rightly grinned at my appointment in September, but there’s a serious side here too. On every local visit since taking office I’ve seen the depth of the country’s housing problems – people relying on the bank of mum and dad to get onto the property ladder or having to live at home into their 30s to save up for a deposit, and growing families who need more space to live. And far from being some arcane issue best left to technocrats, the standards that we build our homes to plays a massive part in what we build and how easily, and in turn in solving the housing problem. (And yes I’ll admit I’ve started to find them quite interesting.)

What started off after the Great Fire of London over three hundred years ago as a simple set of rules to prevent a blaze spreading from one building to the next has grown into an elaborate system that affects every aspect of construction. Some of these are very sensible rules, dealing with things like safety of construction materials, fire escapes, accessibility for disabled people and keeping buildings warm and dry and energy bills down. There are no doubt improvements that we can make, and are making, to these but no one can disagree with the principle of compulsory, minimum safety rules. But I was shocked to find out about the layers of additional standards and red tape, slapped on top of each other by the last government. There are now three sets of standards just on how to build a staircase, and guidance provides for two phone lines as well as broadband connection in home offices, irrespective of whether they’re needed or not. These are just two examples of how far things have gone. What’s more as these standards are voluntary some councils apply them and some don’t, creating a perplexing mish mash across the country.

Just as this government turned over 1,300 pages of technical planning rules into a 50 page, sensible and intelligible framework I’m determined to do the same with buildings standards. This is why I’ve set up an independent challenge panel of housing experts to advise on which building standards serve little or no purpose, confuse matters and we could scrap, all this without ever compromising rules on safety.

This isn’t magically nor overnight going to solve the country’s housing problems, of course. There are multiple causes, from the lack of affordable house building to difficulty in obtaining planning permission and finance. We are trying to tackle all of these through measures like investing £19.5bn public and private funding in affordable housing, bringing empty homes back into use, making it easier to get planning permission for sustainable developments, and kick starting stalled private sector developments. But it’s also important to get the final step right: what we build. The current system can baffle even professional housebuilders, let alone the average person who wants to build their own home. We have one of the lowest levels of self building anywhere in the world, yet every year self builders create more new homes than some individual, volume housebuilders.

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I want to free up housebuilders and more budding self builders to get on with the job of constructing the new homes we so desperately need, doing it as simply as possible but to very high standards. And in the process this will create the jobs and growth we need just as much as the new homes. So I think this is a job very well worth doing, and as such I’m not looking back on the Baftas, the premières or all the rest of it.